]]>Project Year Book 2016 – 2017 now Availablehttp://mayawoerterbuch.de/project-year-book-2016-2016-now-available/
Fri, 29 Mar 2019 12:40:03 +0000http://mayawoerterbuch.de/?p=8678In addition to the electronic distribution format the project will make a selection of its digital resources (published on its website) periodically available as an e-book and a printed volume. This web-to-print initiative is part of the project’s long term preservation and information dissemination strategy, combining the traditional publication formats with digital distribution of research data under the label of CC-BY. Principally, project information, in particular stable web contents and publications (DOI) that are released over the course of the project, will be made available in digital format at no cost on the project’s website, which has its own ISSN 2366-5556. The project’s website is established as a blog in the catalog of the German National Library and in the international ISSN Portal. This situation guarantees that blog contents will be citable as a network publication with an open target audience.

The second year book has been made by and can be ordered directly via Books on Demand, Amazon or any other distributor. The Year Book for 2016 and 2017 includes online publications that members and associates of the research project have issued on the website www.mayawoerterbuch.de. The first volume gathers ten research reports, working papers, research notes as well as a selection of web contents.

Christian M. Prager1

1 Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn

A few years ago, Alexandre Tokovinine published convincing arguments for the identification of a logograph IB representing the word “lima bean” (2014). He suggested that the newly identified word sign is the character T709 classified in Eric Thompson’s catalog of Maya hieroglyphs (1962) (Figure 1). However, the Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan project’s recent revision and emendation of Thompson’s catalog has shown that the graph deciphered by Tokovinine is not T709 or “ink”, but rather another graph that Thompson did not include in his inventory. Martha Macri and Matthew Looper also do not distinguish between the two signs, listing both under the designation YGA (2003:370) (Figure 1).

According to Thompson’s original index cards which have been made available to the project, the so-called “gray cards” (Figure 2), the sign for the word “ink” is classified under the nomenclature 709. Proposed readings of this graph by Nikolai Grube (1994) and David Stuart (2012) are SABAK, YABAK, ABAK and SIBIK.

1576st

1576hh

675bv

709bv

Figure 1. The standard (st) and portrait form (hh) of IB “lima bean” (1576st and 1576hh), the variant 675bv (bipartite vertical) and the standard form of the glyph representing “ink” (709bv). Drawings by Christian Prager / Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan.

We have therefore reclassified the “lima bean” hieroglyph and assigned it the new label 1576, following Thompson’s system (Figure 1). We also introduced a new classification to designate the portrait form of the sign 1576 under the label 1576hh (“head human”). In a 1994 manuscript, Nikolai Grube presented various contexts that prove that Maya scribes interchanged the two signs due to their similarity and sometimes used sign 1576 to write the word “ink”. Furthermore, he proved that sign 675 substitutes for 1576 when used as the month patron for Pax (Figure 3). A few years ago, this observation was taken up again by Christophe Helmke and further developed (2013). While Helmke suggested that the hieroglyphic expression of this month patron could be interpreted as the term sabakte’, Tokovinine’s decipherment now allows us to read it as ibte’ or ibalte’ “bean tree” (Tokovinine 2014:14). To conclude, Grube’s earlier and Helmke’s and Tokovinine’s more recent studies reveal that there were at least three different signs that denoted either “lima bean” or “ink”, respectively. We consider this fact in our revised catalogue and thus use three different nomenclatures to distinguish them: graphs 675 and 1576 for IB “lima bean” and graph 709 for “ink”.

Figure 2. Image of sheet 367 from Eric Thompson’s original „gray cards“ with examples for the character T709 (copyright not evaluated).

Figure 3. Variants of the patron of the month Pax or ibte’ “Bean Tree”: substitution between the compound 675bv.87bv and 1576st.1087st (image quote from Helmke 2013:fig. 4).

According to Tokovinine’s paper (2014), the main arguments in support of the IB decipherment are full phonetic renderings i-bi-li, preposed i-IB, and postponed phonetic complementation IB-bi. Furthermore, the icon of sign 1576 corresponds to the image of a whole or partial bean plant. Here I present an additional, previously unpublished context that supports Tokovinine’s decipherment, on a shallow bowl that was recently offered for sale by Millon Drouot in Paris on December 1, 2018, from the collection of Arturo Aguinaga (Drouot 2018:Lot 69) (Figure 4). According to the images provided by the auction house, the bowl is well-preserved and has an outward-flaring wall and a flat base, and measures 5.5 cm in height and 15.5 cm in diameter (Millon Drouot 2018:Lot 69). It is painted in the so-called Codex Style. The rim is red and the cream-coloured painted exterior of the bowl displays stylized and personified bean plants with hieroglyphic inscriptions painted in black. Based on stylistic and epigraphic content, the vessel can be assigned to the period between AD 672 and 830 and attributed to the Nakbé region (Drouot 2018:Lot 69).

Figure 4. Still image of the “Lima Bean Vessel” and rollout of the exterior displaying the hieroglyphic text and images of personified beans (copyrighted photographs by Virginie Rouffignac, 2018)

The bowl is painted with a short hieroglyphic inscription and floral iconography. The text is divided into two text fields containing a total of four readable hieroglyphic blocks, two in each field, framed by floral motives. The inscription names the owner of the vessel and provides information about its original use as container for beans.

A1

B1

C1

D1

17st.[1576st:24st]1)Numeric codes according to the standards set by J. Eric S. Thompson (1962) with corrections and emendations by the project. Sign variants are indicated by a two-letter code appended to the numeric code (Prager and Gronemeyer 2016).

The inscription contains a short dedicatory text and identifies the owner by his titles only, rather than by a personal name. The titles k’uh chatahn and sak wayhis (C1-D1) associate him with the region encompassing Calakmul, Uxul and La Corona, where these titles often occur (Martin 2017; Grube et al. 2012:21-25). The dish is further labelled as ja-yi or jaay or “clay bowl” (B1), a term first deciphered by the late Alfonso Lacadena (1997). According to the text, the bowl originally must have served as container for lima beans, as suggested by the introductory compound yi-IB-li or y-ib-il. Block A1 clearly exhibits the logograph IB. The prevocalic form of the third-person singular ergative pronoun (y-) provides further support for Tokovinine’s decipherment of IB as “lima bean”.

The inscription on this clay bowl also hints that it may have been used to serve a particular bean dish. Recently, David Stuart published a short note about an inscription on a similar bowl in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2016) (Figure 6). The respective dedicatory text reads yi-chi-li ja-ya and is followed by the name of the owner, a young lord from the Eastern Petén region. According to Stuart, the compound yi-chi-li ja-ya is best analyzed as y-ich-il jaay “his chili vessel”. In the same note, Stuart also refers to a sherd from Calakmul which exhibits the compound i-chi-li ja-ya for ich-il jaay. Stuart explains that the addition of the -Vl suffix in ichil may either derive an adjective from the root noun or another noun meaning “chili sauce”, the latter being attested in Colonial Yukatek: “salsa con chile y caldo con chile y carne y qualquier guisado assi” (Ciudad Real 1984:221v); thus, ichil jaay could be interpreted as “(it is) a chili vessel” or “(it is) a chili sauce(?) vessel”. The suffix -il in the word y-ib-il recorded on the auctioned bowl presented here seems to be the same suffix that Stuart (2016) previously identified for ichil “chili sauce”. Accordingly, the suffix -il would alter the meaning from ib “lima bean” to ibil “lima bean paste”, possibly some kind of Classic Maya “baked beans”, or a predecessor of “frijoles refritos”.

Figure 6. The term ichil jaay “chili vessel” on a shallow bowl, collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accession no. 1988.1264. Image and concept by David Stuart (2016).

The bowl’s main textual and pictorial theme is clearly beans. The pictorial area is most likely embellished with a rendition of a personified lima bean (Figure 4). Many objects in Maya art, such as natural features, artefacts or plants, are given faces. The scene here shows a personified or zoomorphic bean plant coughing up an elongated, speckled object that has the typical characteristics of a lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus). It thus raises the question of how we should understand emic concepts of plant growth or fruit formation among the Classic Maya. This representation of a living plant as an animal-like creature regurgitating a fruit from its gaping snout as kind of visual birth metaphor could provide preliminary clues to such concepts. Such an image of a plant emanating its seed has far-reaching implications and will be the subject of a separate article.

This research note, in sum, has proven that the Classic Maya used bowls in which beans were prepared and probably served as food, and designated some ceramics for this purpose with glyphic tags. With the identification of the term ibil jaay for “lima bean vessel”, we recover not only an emic name for such a vessel, but also a new entry for the dictionary of Classic Mayan.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Daniel Graña-Behrens, Dmitri Beliaev, Albert Davletshin, Sven Gronemeyer, Nikolai Grube, Mallory Matsumoto, and Elisabeth Wagner for constructive criticism of the text.

References

Ciudad Real, Antonio de
1984 Calepino maya de Motul. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Méxcio.Grube, Nikolai
1994 Is T709, the Main Sign of the Glyph for the Fourth Lord of the Night, a Logogram for abak / yabak “Powder, Ink, Charcoal”? Unpublished Unpublished Manuscript. Bonn.Grube, Nikolai, Kai Delvendahl, Nicolaus Seefeld, and Beniamino Volta
2012 Under the Rule of the Snake Kings: Uxul in the 7th and 8th Centuries. Estudios de Cultura Maya 40:11–49.Helmke, Christophe
2013 Mesoamerican Lexical Calques in Ancient Maya Writing and Imagery. The PARI Journal 14(2):1–15.Lacadena García-Gallo, Alfonso
1997 Comments on the (u-)ha-yi Compound in the Primary Standard Sequence. Paper presented at the First Leiden Maya Symposium, Leiden.Macri, Martha J., and Matthew G. Looper
2003 The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs: The Classic Period Inscriptions. Civilization of the American Indian Series 247. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK.Martin, Simon
2017 Secrets of the Painted King List: Recovering the Early History of the Snake Dynasty. Maya Decipherment. https://decipherment.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/secrets-of-the-painted-king-list-recovering-the-early-history-of-the-snake-dynasty/, accessed December 10, 2018.Million Drouot (editor)
2018 Arts de l’Amérique Précolombienne: Collection Arturo Aguinaga, Barcelona. Million Drouot, ParisPrager, Christian M., and Sven Gronemeyer
2016 Neue Ergebnisse in der Erforschung der Graphemik und Graphetik des Klassischen Maya. Unpublished Electronic Document. Bonn. https://www.academia.edu/33672448/, accessed December 10, 2018.Stuart, David
2012 On Effigies of Ancestors and Gods. Maya Decipherment. http://decipherment.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/on-effigies-of-ancestors-and-gods/, accessed December 10, 2018.
2016 Chili Vessels. Maya Decipherment. https://decipherment.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/chili-vessels/, accessed December 10, 2018.Thompson, J. Eric S.
1962 A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs. The Civilization of the American Indian Series 62. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK.Tokovinine, Alexandre
2014 Beans and Glyphs: A Possible IB Logogram in the Classic Maya Script. The PARI Journal 14(4):10–16.

Numeric codes according to the standards set by J. Eric S. Thompson (1962) with corrections and emendations by the project. Sign variants are indicated by a two-letter code appended to the numeric code (Prager and Gronemeyer 2016).

KULTUR extrA

]]>Launch of the „Maya Image Archive“http://mayawoerterbuch.de/launch-of-the-maya-image-archive/
Mon, 13 Aug 2018 09:59:41 +0000http://mayawoerterbuch.de/?p=8519New Project Resource
The project's "Maya Image Archive" has now been launched and is available to the public. As an initial data set, we have selected ca. 5,700 black and white photographs taken by Karl Herbert Mayer.]]>New Project Resource

The project’s „Maya Image Archive“ has now been launched and is available to the public. As an initial data set, we have selected ca. 5,700 black and white photographs taken by Karl Herbert Mayer.

Maya Image Archive

The Maya Image Archive is intended to host research materials provided by various scholars, such as Karl Herbert Mayer, Berthold Riese, Stephan Merk and the members of the project among others. Comprising image collections with photographs, drawings, notes and manuscripts, the Maya Image Archive allows the user to browse through the results of several decades of research trips through the entire Maya region.

Forming the backbone of the Maya Image Archive, the black-and-white photo archive of Karl Herbert Mayer comprises thousands of photographs, dating from 1974 to 2006. During his numerous trips, Karl Herbert Mayer focused particularly on documenting sculpted and painted monuments with iconographic or epigraphic content. For that purpose he not only visited numerous museums and archaeological collections, but also explored the most remote archaeological sites in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. In the near future, the complete collection of Karl Herbert Mayer’s photographs will be made accessible to the public, enhancing and complementing the comprehensive documentation that Karl Herbert Mayer had already provided in his well known series of publications on unprovenanced Maya monuments (published 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1995) and hundreds of articles in academic journals.

Moreover, the Maya Image Archive aims to be much more than a simple compilation of documents. In the database, the information attached to the documents has been organized in a coherent metadata schema with its content systematically revised and enriched in order to allow users to efficiently conduct targeted and diverse searches.

Still under construction and continuously extended, the Maya Image Archive is hosted by the project Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya (TWKM) (Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan), established at the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Arts.

Free Access

All media and information presented in the Maya Image Archive is accessable freely and without login, under the terms and conditions of our CC BY 4.0 licence.

The Maya Image Archive uses the web-based open source database system ConedaKOR to facilitate the administration and presentation of its research materials.

Editiorial Rights

In cooperation with the Digital Research Infrastructure DARIAH-DE the database is made accessable as a DARIAH-DE Web Service via federated Login. The federated login is available for all users with a DARIAH-account.

Further, registration to the database is possible on request.

Users entering the database of the Maya Image Archive as registered user or via federated login are granted specific editorial rights. These rights include creating their own collections within the archive, and entering additional information to enrich the database.

If you have any questions about content edition, registration or federated login, please contact us.

Data and Metadata

All material of the Maya Image Archive has been documented and digitized by members of the TWKM project.

With respect to the metadata scheme, the digitized images are presented as the entity type “Medium” which is related to a variety of other entities such as Person, Archaeological Site, Place, Collection or Holder. All entities have several properties and are represented in relation to one another via a graph-based structure.

]]>The Signs 740 and 812 for SIH “Gift”: Representation and Meaning in the Maya Codiceshttp://mayawoerterbuch.de/the-signs-740-and-812-for-sih-gift-representation-and-meaning-in-the-maya-codices/
http://mayawoerterbuch.de/the-signs-740-and-812-for-sih-gift-representation-and-meaning-in-the-maya-codices/#respondMon, 28 May 2018 14:37:59 +0000http://mayawoerterbuch.de/?p=8475Research Note 10
In his sign catalog, Eric Thompson (1962:320–322) includes under sign no. 740 two graphs that are nearly identical. Their icon represents an upward-facing iguana head, but differ by a row of dots atop the mouth of one variant.]]>Research Note 10

Christian M. Prager1

1 Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn

In his sign catalog, Eric Thompson (1962:320–322) includes under sign no. 740 two graphs that are nearly identical. Their icon represents an upward-facing iguana head, but differ by a row of dots atop the mouth of one variant. The first variant of T740 lacking the dots represents the syllable hu1)The decipherment hu has first been proposed independently by Nikolai Grube and Barbara MacLeod in 1990 (MacLeod 1990; Schele et al. 1992:2). (Figure 1a); the second grapheme with the row of dots (Figure 1b) is read as SIY, SIH, or SIJ, depending on its respective context (Houston 1997:292; Stuart 2005:78). All these respective linguistic readings of the logogram are plausible interpretations that will be discussed below in further detail.

Hieroglyphs meaning ‘birth’, including siyaj ‘be born’, sihyaj or sijyaj ‘be bestowed’ (represented by the grapheme T740), and pan kab or tal kab ‘touch the earth’ (T217:526) (MacLeod 1991:2–3; Stuart 2005:79) are, with over 100 attestations, among the most frequently used verbs in texts from the Classic period (Gronemeyer 2014:617–621), because of the large number of biographical reports about Maya rulers and members of their courts (Proskouriakoff 1960; Schele 1982).

Linguistic references to ‘birth’ are numerous, but in contrast with illustrations of violence, military conquest, or abasement, there are hardly any portrayals of birth in Maya art that are true to reality (Houston et al. 2006:202–226). The so-called ‘Birth Vase’ (K5113) seems to illustrate one of the very few exceptions, although it shows the woman preparing herself for giving birth, rather than the sequence of the birth itself (Taube 1994). Vessel K559 shows the Moon Goddess giving birth to the Moon Rabbit. Another painted ceramic vessel bears the representation of the newborn Sun God with the umbilicus and placenta still attached to his navel and God L cutting his umbilical cord with an obsidian knife (Fondation de l’Hermitage 2004:frontispiece). Symbolic images that are interpreted in the scholarly literature as representations of birth show anthropomorphic actors emerging from a split, anthropomorphic skull, an anthropomorphic blossom, turtle shells, or a cleft in the so-called earth band (Figure 2). All iconographic representations of birth have in common the depiction of a V-shaped break or fissure in an object out of which the relevant actor appears.

Figurations of birth are found in the name phrases of several Classic Maya rulers, in which the essential divine figures, including K’awiil, Chahk, or K’inich, are born out of a fissure or crack in the heavens, from of the sun, or from fire. Birth from a fissure or crack in a specific object is a symbolic representation of this life-beginning act and is widespread in Mesoamerica (Stuart and Houston 1996:294–295; Stuart et al. 1999:II-47; Houston et al. 2006:167).

Figure 2. The symbolic representation of the birth of the maize god on an unprovenanced ceramic vessel (Kerr 2723). The infant maize god is shown in a pose that is characteristic for representing infants in Maya art (e.g. the jaguar baby). He lies on the head variant of the grapheme T533, which may represent a personified blossom (Martin 2002) or a seed kernel. This grapheme has not been phonetically deciphered, but it belongs to the semantic field of ‘seed, fruit; harvest; child’. The short caption above the lying figure contains an epiclesis that describes the figure as ‘one who is born from the fluid’ (aj siy ich) (Houston et al. 2006:167), the fluid indicated by the water-band in the background of this birth scene (copyrighted photograph by Justin Kerr [www.mayavase.com]).

The hieroglyph most commonly used to denote birth is the logogram T740 (see compilation in Schele 1982). Tatiana Proskouriakoff first associated this grapheme with an event in the initial years of an individual’s life and semantically interpreted it as referring to birth, baptism, or an initiation rite (Proskouriakoff 1960:460,470). Its semantics was later narrowed even further and interpreted as a birth hieroglyph, because it is linked to the earliest date in an individual’s life cycle (Kelley 1976:219; Justeson 1984:354).

Although the meaning is confirmed, its phonetic decipherment remains problematic due to the lack of full phonetic complementation. The preposed phonetic complement 157si, attested on two stelae, Piedras Negras Stela 12 and Uxmal Stela 17, indicates that the logograph begins with the initial sequence si-. More recently, support for this decipherment may come from a shell inscription from the Palenque region which exhibits a possible phonetic spelling si-ya-ja, first identified by Yuriy Polyukhovich (2012). Here, the scribe employs a rare variant of the syllable si, representing a rodent-like creature first discussed by Luis Lopes (2011).

These occurrences support the reading that John Justeson initially proposed, SIH ‘to be born’ (Justeson 1978:299). However, the conjugational pattern that Schele (1982:373) presents for this intransitive verb suggests that the logograph ends in either -ij or -iy, depending on the interpretation of the final syllabic sign as indicating inflection or a phonetic complement. Whereas Justeson and colleagues (1984:354) favor the Yukatekan-based reading SIH, Houston (Houston 1997:294) and Robert Wald (2000:130) use the phoneme SIY. Both proposals are plausible from an epigraphic perspective, because a series of occurrences end in -ji-ya, while other examples end only in -ya (Schele 1982:373).

Justeson’s proposal concurs with the colonial-period Yukatek form zihil ‘be born’ (Michelon 1976). The lexeme is not attested in Ch’olan languages with this meaning, although the expressions zii ‘offering’ and zihi ‘bestow’ occur in Ch’olti’ (Morán 1935). Both Robert Wald and Stephen Houston treat 126ya as a phonetic indicator and argue that the lexeme must read SIY ‘be born’, based on the phonetic complement -ya. Wald thus interprets the ending –ji-ya as temporal deixis, analyzes the sign sequence T740-126-181 as si[h]y-aj-ø, and translates it as ‘is born’ (Wald 2000:130).

Yet several questions remain unanswered. For one, it is unclear whether the affixes serve as phonetic complements or grammatical morphemes. Furthermore, one must account for the possibility that the grapheme pattern T740-181 constitutes a multigraph, i.e. T181 is not interpreted as ja, but rather, as a component of a complex sign as a variant of T740, and thus it is not read individually. Moreover, the translations of the phonemes SIY and SIH are in no way certain. Both the Yukatek lexeme sih ‘be born’ and zii and zih-i ‘bestow’ attested in Ch’olti’ (Morán 1935) would make sense in the context of the confirmed meaning (‘he was born’ and ‘he was bestowed’), because in different hieroglyphic texts, the lexeme sih meaning ‘gift, offering’ comprises part of the three-part relational hieroglyphic phrase ‘child of father’: u sih u chit2)According to Barbara MacLeod, the lexeme chit in the hieroglyphic inscriptions is cognate with Yucatec ket ‘same thing; similar; together’ (Barrera Vásquez 1980:312) (email from Barbara MacLeod, November 2009). Peter Mathews and Peter Biro argue for a link with Yucatec kit ‘father’ and thus propose the translation ‘father’ for chit (Mathews and Bíró 2006).ch’ab ‘(is) his gift, his co-creator/father’ (Figure 3; Grube 1990:55; Stuart 1997; Stuart et al. 1999:II-56; Grube 2004:66; Boot 2009; Mathews and Bíró 2006).

Based on this reading, according to Classic Maya concepts and beliefs, newborns could be understood as the father’s offering or gift. Modern Ch’ol Maya believe that in ejaculation, men loose part of their life essence, which adheres to bones, flesh, and blood. According to Helfrich’s report on sexuality among modern Maya every ejaculation is associated with a dangerous weakening of the man, his gift to the new life (Helfrich 1972:150-151).The linguistic reading and interpretation of the birth hieroglyph as sihyaj ‘was handed over, bestowed, created’ seems plausible in the context of an entry in the colonial-era Diccionario de San Francisco, according to which the lemma zihyah means ‘be born, created’ (Michelon 1976), which corresponds most closely to the hieroglyphic spelling SIH-ya-ja. More recently, in the analysis of Tortuguero Monument 6, Barbara MacLeod argued that ja is “[t]he grammatical indicator for an inchoative, suffixed to the nominal root sih ‘gift’. The resulting *sih-aj became siyaj through reduction of the final [h] to zero”, as attested by the frequent ya syllable attached to the SIH logograph (Gronemeyer and MacLeod 2010:46). Gronemeyer (2014: fn. 672) further elaborated this sound shift as “a lenition process [h,x] > [j] / __VC” that likely developed around 500 AD.

As a preliminary summary, SIH represents the most acceptable interpretation of the grapheme T740, connoting the meanings ‘be born, created’ and ‘bestow, offer, give’, respectively. Due to the fact that the lexeme sih is used in the familial term ‘child of father’ with the meaning ‘give; offering’, I prefer the phonetic decipherment sihyaj for the birth glyph, and thus the interpretation ‘was bestowed’. However, no confirmation in the form of a phonetic substitution of si-hi for T740 has been found to date. Thus, only analysis of the context of all occurrences of T740 and the codical variant T812 (Figure 4) can determine the plausibility of this interpretation.

In Classic period stone inscriptions from the Maya Lowlands, the grapheme with the logographic reading SIH ‘bestow’ or SIY ‘(be) born’ refers in biographical texts to the birth of both historical and supernatural actors, in the latter case frequently as a verbal component of complex anthroponymic phrases (Colas 2004:120–124). Many anthroponyms from Classic era inscriptions represent so-called sentence names or Satznamen (Grube 2002:74–75), which use complex predicates to emphasize agentive aspects of preferably supernatural actors, such as K’inich associated with the sun, the rain god Chahk, or K’awiil as a manifestation of kingly power, who, in accordance with their personal name, were portrayed as having been born in the heavens, water, or the sun (Stuart and Houston 1996:295ff., Colas 2004:140–141).

With few exceptions, the personal names of kings were theonyms; in fact, they functioned to highlight the proximity of its bearer to the divine or supernatural world and to connect him with characteristics of supernatural actors or aspects of their actions (Grube 2002:77). According to Grube, rulers thus never referred to themselves using only the name of a supernatural actor; rather, they added adpositions to the nominal phrase that referred to specific characteristics or features of that actor’s activities.

a

b

Figure 5. The hieroglyph for ‘birth’ as it appears a) on Yaxchilan, Lintel 30 (3D image by Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan, 2017) and b) as the codical variant on page 83b of the Madrid Codex (drawing from Villacorta and Villacorta [1930]).

No occurrences of the grapheme T740 are known in monumental texts from the Classic period outside the context of birth references. Over 30 years ago, George Taack voiced his suspicion that the grapheme T812 in the Madrid Codex represented the codical variant of T740, and that both graphemes represented the value ZIJ (Taack 1976:33). This hypothesis must be confirmed based on the representation on page 83b of the Madrid Codex. This section features an almanac with an illustration of three divine figures (Gods C, H, and A) emerging with raised arms from the middle of a shell or from a split object. As mentioned previously, this motif is widespread in Mesoamerica and represents a visual metaphor for birth (Brinton 1894:75; Spinden 1913:83–84; Kelley 1976:150; Pohl 1983:78).

In the texts corresponding to these scenes (Figures 5, 6), the event is described using the hieroglyph T812-ya-ja, followed by the hieroglyph K’UH, then by the nominal phrase of the relevant actor. The grapheme sequence ya-ja is the suffix sequence that occurs most frequently with the birth hieroglyph T740 (Schele 1982). Based on the morphological and structural correspondences between SIH-ya-ja and T812-ya-ja, as well as the visual birth metaphor associated with them, it is reasonable to suppose that T812 is in fact the codical variant of T740. According to Gabrielle Vail, there are twelve occurrences of the grapheme T812 in the Madrid Codex (Vail and Hernández 2010).

The almanac on page 83b (Figure 6) features three t’ol with images of gods rising with raised arms from the icon of a shell or from a split or fissure in an unidentified object (Vail und Hernández 2010). The accompanying text above the individual scenes is formulaic and explains that each image shows a k’uh being born or given (siyaj k’uh / sihyaj k’uh). This is then followed in the last two hieroglyphic blocks of the individual t’ol by the personal names of the actors: first, Itzamnaaj or God D with a modifier, then God H with his modifying hieroglyph, and finally the death god or God A, who emerges from a broken object with no diagnostic features resembling an eggshell, rather than from a shell.

Figure 6. Page 83 of the Madrid Codex: Illustration and description of the birth of three divine beings referred to in this almanac with the term k’uh (illustration from Villacorta and Villacorta [1930]).

The relationship between text and image permits conclusions to be drawn concerning conceptions and beliefs relating to k’uh. In the scene of the first t’ol, God C or k’uh is shown arising from a shell, but the text accompanying or explaining the scene mentions the birth of God D or Itzamnaaj: sihyaj k’uh ‘a k’uh is born/bestowed’. This suggests overlap between portrayals of Gods D and C, which allow further inferences about the concept of k’uh, namely that God D likely represents a category of gods included under the classificatory term k’uh. Evidence for this can be found in both of the subsequent t’ol in this almanac, whose texts mention the birth of k’uh and in which Gods H and A are illustrated and named. A plausible interpretation of this case is that Gods D, H, and A are encompassed under a category of supernatural actors, which in the Madrid Codex is described as k’uh.

The function of the syllabic sign 181ja affixed to T1016 needs further explanation. It could be the absolutive suffix -aj, which is affixed exclusively to lexical morphemes denoting personal objects, such as clothing, jewelry, or heirlooms (Zender 2004:199–200). If this interpretation is correct, the lexeme k’uh refers to a tangible object that thus was not born, but rather given as a gift or handed over (sihyaj k’uhaj). However, this interpretation remains tenuous, because only one occurrence of this construction is attested in all texts that were examined. Alternatively, T181 -aj could be interpreted as a suffix that is attested in other contexts as denoting ‘person, entity’ (Stuart 2005:76), whereby sihyaj k’uhaj would mean ‘it was born, the k’uh being’. Another possibility is that T181 could be serving as a phonetic complement for the logogram 1016K’UH, or it could be interpreted as a scribal error, which would not be unusual for the Madrid Codex. In the latter two occurrences of the hieroglyph for k’uh on page 83c, the grapheme 181ja is missing; thus, it can be assumed that the 181ja suffixed to 1016K’UH on page 83b is indeed a scribal error.

A securely identifiable occurrence of the hieroglyphic compound siy / sih + k’uh with an accompanying pictorial representation is attested on a ceramic vessel of unknown provenience (Kerr 1184; Figure 7) that has been generally dated to the Late Classic (Wichmann 2004a:85). Additional contexts with representations of this sequence from the Post-Classic can be found in the almanacs on pages 83b and 111c of the Madrid Codex. However, because of the uncertain identification of T812 as a codical variant of 740SIH / SIJ / SIY, they remain problematic, and must therefore be discussed in the epigraphic section of this paper.

Figure 7. Roll-out photograph of the ceramic vase Kerr 1184 with a visual narrative and accompanying text about the so-called “skull birth” of a k’uh with the name Huk Ye Tok’ at a place described as ‘in/at/on the mountain’ (ti witz). This occurs in the presence of a male (left) and (female) k’uh in front of a black background, which indicates a particular mythical landscape related to the creation of the cosmos (Boot 2006:16) (copyrighted photograph by Justin Kerr [www.mayavase.com]).

The iconographic representation of the birth of a god or a human from a shell is a cultural convention from the Post-Classic Maya that is also found in other areas of Mesoamerica. “As the snail emerges from its shell, so does man from the womb of his mother” Eduard Seler once wrote about this conception of birth, thus expressing the visual analogy that these images make between the birthing process of humans and the image of a snail crawling out from its shell (Seler 1902-1923:424). Mircea Eliade referred to the broad dissemination of this visual analogy in his ahistorical and reductionist phenomenology of religious symbolism and demonstrated that sea shells and sea snails represented visual metaphors for fertility, the womb, conception, pregnancy, and birth in the New World more broadly, not only in certain ancient cultural phases (Jackson 1917:55ff.; Eliade 1991:125ff.).

From a phenomenological perspective, the birth of divine beings illustrated and articulated in writing in the Madrid Codex belongs to the greater sum of intercultural evidence for this fertility and life symbolism, whose central elements represent water and its inhabitants, including shells, snails, etc. The discovery of a sacrificial cache in Copan datable to the Middle Classic, which features a three-dimensional representation of a jade figure of the maize god rising from a shell (Sharer et al. 1991), proves that the motif was attested early on, cross-culturally widespread, and belonged to the cultural inventory of many Maya communities until the time of contact and beyond.

Among the contemporary Tz’utujiil, for instance, shells still represent cave entrances and portals to the watery underworld, where, according to Tz’utujiil cosmology, rainclouds were born and enter into the world through cave entrances (Christenson 2001:83). In the belief system of many Maya groups, snail shells and sea shells represented the underworld regions of the world and their inhabitants, which were associated in the cosmology with the earth, birth, and re-birth (Thompson 1950:133). Due to a lack of understanding of the causal relationship between these cultural representations, which are clearly distinct temporal and spatially, one must of course be cautious about interpreting this apparently widespread motif. What is comparable is not the motif as a cultural representation, but rather the manner in which people in Mesoamerica or beyond have conceived of or coded the birth of beings or supernatural actors (Paden 2001).

The study of the other contexts of T812 is still outstanding, after the discussion of the hieroglyph T812 as a variant of T740 SIH ‘(be) born; bestow’. Analysis of these contexts is necessary, because with respect to the reading of T812 as SIH, it remains open to debate whether the lexeme should be interpreted as ‘(be) born’ or ‘bestow’. A glimpse at the relevant sections of the Madrid Codex reveals that the translation of the lexeme sih as ‘give, bestow’ is plausible, and that T812 and T740 should be interpreted as the logogram SIH ‘give; bestow’. Three attestations of this grapheme are attested in a predicative function in almanacs on page 20c, 83b, 92c, and 111c of the Madrid Codex (Zimmermann 1956:69).

Figure 8. Page 102b of the Madrid Codex: the representation of two gods weaving a textile on a wooden loom that is described in the text with sihyaj ti te’ ‘it is created with a piece of wood’ (illustration from Villacorta and Villacorta [1930]).

Two additional occurrences of the sign sequence 812SIH–126ya–181ja (Figure 8) serve as a predicate in the text accompanying two images of an almanac dedicated to weaving textiles (Thomas 1882:118; Förstemann 1902:144; Ciaramella 1999). On the left, the image shows the so-called Goddess O, and in the second t’ol, the death god, or God A. Both actors sit in front of an abstract image of a tree or post, to which a weaving frame with a textile is fixed with a cord, and she is working on the textile with a shuttle. The illustration is described in the texts accompanying both scenes with the verb sihyaj and the adposition ti te’ ‘on the tree, with wood’. In Colonial era Yukatek Maya, the lexeme sihyaj means not only ‘be born’, but also ‘make, create’ (Pérez 1866). Thus, ‘it was created on the tree/with wood’ presents itself as a plausible translation for the text accompanying the weaving scene. Goddess O in the first scene, and God A in the second t’ol, weave a textile with the aid of a weaving instrument and are thus active as the actors. According to this reading of the passage, the creator of the codex compares weaving to a creative act or birth.

There is a short almanac in the bottom section of page 111 of the Madrid Codex (Figure 9) whose imagery shows two gods in front of smoking incense burners, with copal burning in the left and bones in the right (Förstemann 1902:159). The almanac constitutes part of the so-called bee chapter, which is dedicated to raising and caring for bees, as well as gathering honey (Ciaramella 2004). The almanac immediately preceding this section deals with the incense burners, honey gathering, and cleaning the bee hives, whereas the following almanac concerns the destruction of the hives. Both actors in this almanac are located in front of smoking incense burners and reach their hands toward them. Hieroglyphs that are employed as icons help indicate that copal and bones are being burned.

Figure 9. Both sections in the almanac on page 111c of the Madrid Codex show God D and God A in front of incense burners, in which copal (left) and bones (right) are being burned. In the text, the action is described as sihyaj k’uh ‘k’uh is created/born’, or alternatively, u sih k’uh ‘he offers k’uh’ (illustration from Villacorta and Villacorta [1930]).

The accompanying hieroglyphic text in the first two blocks of each text consists of the sign sequence 812SIH-1u1016K’UH. It can be interpreted as either u sih k’uh or sih[y]aj k’uh, because the grapheme 1u that follows the sign T812 represents either an ergative pronoun that should actually have been placed in front of T812, or it is a scribal error instead of the sign 181ja that could indicate the reading sihyaj for 812SIH–1u. The representation of the incense burner scene and the interpretation as a sacrificial event could indicate that the associated text should be reconstructed as u sih k’uh and translated as ‘it is the gifting/giving/sacrificing of the k’uh’, given that the root zii means ‘offering, gift’ in Ch’olti’ (Morán 1935). In any case, there is no iconographic evidence from the sacrificial scene that would allow an interpretation of the hieroglyphic sequence as ‘birth’. Morphologically, it could be a possessed null nominalization, in which the nominalization is expressed by a null morpheme, and the expression can thus be paraphrased as ‘his k’uh-giving/his k’uh-offering’ (Wichmann 2004b:331). In this case, k’uh would be the grammatical object, and the portrayed actors, Gods D and A, respectively, would serve as the subject.

Another image with comparable content is found on page 83c of the Madrid Codex (Figure 10). The illustration shows God E and God A as actors carrying objects in a slightly hunched position. The left-hand image represents a ball of copal covered in stingray spines and strips of paper, and on the right, God A stands in front of an incense burner to deposit something in it (compare Vail and Hernández 2010). The hieroglyphic text associated with both t’ol is, with the exception of the nominal phrases, identical, and contains the sign sequence 57si-186hi-568lu1016K’UH181ja-668CH’AB-24li + name of god / modifier. The identification of the individual signs in the first glyph block and the reading order are problematic, and thus require further discussion. The identification of the graphemes 57si and 186hi is secure, but it remains unclear whether the middle grapheme is 82li, 568lu or 188le, as Gabrielle Vail suggests in her commentary on the codex (Vail and Hernández 2010). She reads the glyph block as sileh, but does not provide a translation.

Figure 10. The almanac on page 83c of the Madrid Codex shows God E and God A with ritual paraphernalia like that typically used in ritual blood sacrifices. The event is described in the text as sihVl k’uh aj ch’abVil ‘k’uh is the gift of the sacrificer’ (illustration from Villacorta and Villacorta [1930]).

However, given the sign morphology, it can be assumed that it is a variant of the grapheme 568lu or 82li and that the first block should be transcribed as si-hi-li or si-hi-lu. There are alternative interpretations for the transliteration, morphological segmentation, and analysis, because of the interpretative approaches to disharmonic and harmonic spellings in Maya writing. According to Lacadena and Wichmann’s (2004) model, the sign sequence si-hi-lu should be interpreted as sihi’l, and according to Houston, Stuart, and Robertson (2004) should be transliterated as sihl. Finally, si-hi-lu could also be interpreted as a defective spelling of the lemma sihul. The affix -i’l is attested in neither Classic Mayan nor in modern Mayan languages, but the lemma sihl could represent a nominalized form of ‘gift (verb)’ and thus mean ‘gift (noun)’, and the phrase sihl k’uh on page 83c could be translated with ‘k’uh is a gift’. The following sign sequence, ja-CH’AB-li, contains the root ch’ab, which translates as ‘create; harvest; fast, restrict oneself’ and describes the ritual preparation for blood sacrifice (David Stuart, cited in Schele 1992:42; Mathews and Bíró 2006). It is possible that the scribe intended ja to represent the agentive classifier -aj. If this is the case, this block should be read as aj ch’abil ‘he of the creation’. It may possibly be a title or an event that was realized over the course of a sacrificial ritual.

Thus, the almanac on page 83c may thematize a sacrificial presentation in which, according to the text, k’uh must be presented as an offering. The ritual paraphernalia of this event that are portrayed in the image (stingray spines, paper, copal, and the vessel) are indications that this scene illustrates a blood sacrifice, which is described in the text as ‘k’uh is the offering [of the] sacrificer’. The scene on page 83 of the Madrid Codex is thus comparable in content with that on page 111c, which also illustrates these ritual paraphernalia.

a

b

Figure 11. Two almanacs on pages a) 20c and b) 92c of the Madrid Codex: Gods hold spears (left) and blood letters (right) in their hands. In the accompanying text, the event is represented with the hieroglyphs T812:126 SIH-ya, and the text on page 20c reads u sihya T736 ‘his gifting of “death”. The associated text on page 92c correspondingly reads as u sihya ‘its gifting of [object]’ (illustrations from Villacorta and Villacorta [1930]).

The semantic productivity of the interpretation of sih as ‘give, gift’ increases with two further occurrences of the hieroglyph T812 in the Madrid Codex. In two almanacs on pages 20c and 92c (Figure 11), the depicted actors hold in their hands ornamented spears, in the case of page 20c, or objects decorated with triple knots, which may represent sacrificial knives. The blue-colored spear with snail shell ornamentation on page 20c ends with a bird that is hunted by God A with a spearhead in the second t’ol of the almanac (Förstemann 1902:40). The texts associated with both almanacs include the predicate 1u812SIH-126ya > u sihya, whereby ya serves as a nominalizing suffix for transitive verbs, and the predicate can thus be translated as ‘his gifting, giving’ (Stuart et al. 1999:II-36).

The object on page 92c presumably represents an instrument for ritual bloodletting, on whose upper end feathers were attached, and whose bottom featured a sharp point for cutting into the body. One feature of this implement is the triple knots, known from illustrations of bloodletting instruments from the Classic period (Figure 12; Joralemon 1974; Schele and Miller 1986; Vail and Hernández 2010). Given the identification of the bloodletting instrument and the spear point, it can be assumed that both almanacs are dedicated to ritual bloodletting, which is described in the adjacent text as u sihya ‘his gift, offering’.

Figure 12. Representations of bloodletting implements from the Late Classic (copyrighted drawing by Peter Joralemon [1974:70–71]).

Summary

Analysis of all occurrences of the grapheme T740 and its codical variant T812, which have been identified as the ‘birth’ hieroglyph, indicate that the grapheme denotes the lexeme SIH with the meaning ‘gift (verb), give’ and metaphorically connotes the semantic field of ‘birth’. The text-image contexts in the Madrid Codex that are discussed above extend the alternative interpretation of the verb sih as ‘sacrifice, gift’.

Acknowledgements

I thank Mallory Matsumoto (Brown University) for translating and commenting an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to further comments by Elisabeth Wagner and Sven Gronemeyer. Any errors, omissions and opinions are, however, my own doing.